Today is the second birthday of 1146 miles. I’ve spent way more time doing this than I thought I would. As I’ve transitioned to working full-time and exploring a new city I find myself spending less time writing, but I still keep up with it two years down the road from starting it one random Miami afternoon during a thunderstorm.

Music is about a feeling.

There are quite a few reasons why I keep going but the overarching one is that it’s about a feeling. Music and this blog are about capturing feelings in some form that can be expressed through words, harmonies, melodies. I had a discussion about Pitchfork in the bar the other day and it basically was the guy saying that it was a great source to discover new music and I argued that numerical ratings by wannabe music journalists is antithetical to the purpose of music. We didn’t disagree with each other. Pitchfork is a great place to discover new music; Pitchfork has also built an illusory authority of rating music, which doesn’t better music, the musical industry, or the world at large. If Pitchfork disappeared tomorrow, people would still discover music to love. If 1146 miles disappeared tomorrow, I would still love discovering music and sharing it. That’s because this blog’s journey through music has been about the feelings the music elicits along the way.

That’s why I just post music I like. I hope that people like it, too, but me posting one song, EP, or album doesn’t make it better than or mean it’s better than another. I just like it. It captures a feeling. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the music that I wanted to feature with this post (because it is a slightly more significant post to me) and then I discovered that Summer Heart released the EP, About A Feeling, recently. I’ve moved away from featuring chillwave and lo-fi because my infatuations with those genres has run most of their courses but this EP in name and mood fit way more perfectly than I could have dreamed up. I mean, an EP with hints of Swedish pop and dreampop intertwined with a generally sense of yearning fit neatly into a post that serves almost as the state of 1146 miles address. Some things just feel right. Featuring this feels right.

You may or may not notice that we’ve launched a redesign today as well. There may be tweaks in the coming weeks but overall, the site should be faster and more user-friendly. The redesign has been the central thing on my mind over the past couple weeks, so I would like to apologize that I have been incredibly slow going through communications.

About A Feeling was released April 25th. You can find about David Alexander and his Summer Heart project on Facebook. Hope that you enjoy it.